A bus corridor stayed live through a four-week carriageway repair. We finished on day three.

The brief.

A 240-metre stretch of the A41 northbound carriageway needed full-depth repair. The default plan ran a four-week diversion through a residential network. Bus services along the corridor would have rerouted around it — TfL had pre-flagged the disruption.

Westminster’s traffic team asked: could a portable shuttle hold the corridor live for buses, with a single closed lane for general traffic, while the work was done in place?

It is the kind of question fixed signal infrastructure cannot answer — but it is exactly the kind of question portable, instrumented kit was designed for.

Two M1s, vehicle-actuated, telemetry to the council.

Two M1 units in shuttle mode, vehicle-actuated, with cycle timings tuned to the corridor’s morning and evening profiles. Telemetry was shared with Westminster’s control room from the moment of commissioning.

Through the work window, anyone with access could see the unit state — head colour, cycle in flight, queue presence — at a 10-second cadence. When a contractor lifted the eastern unit on day 2 to relocate by 6 metres, Westminster saw the tilt event before the radio ack came through.

That visibility removed the need for a daily check-in call. The council’s operations team and the contractor were looking at the same record.